Tales of yesterday.
Voices in the lobby bounced off the concrete walls and through my louvered windows. I tossed and cursed them to myself. Getting up I looked at my itouch, 11:19? What the hell? It was a long night but I never sleep this late. Damn… the bus left at 10. Another day to kill. As it was Sunday and the slow season most of the restaurants were closed. I walked to the restaurant next door to Casablanca and had breakfast and several cups of coffee. As I exited the restaurant a man from the bus company, with whom I had dealt last night approached me and told me I had to change my ticket. I had been informed that I should be at the bus station at 9:30 to change my ticket from Flores to Guatemala with my new intended route Flores to Rio Dulce; why had the bus company dispatched somebody from Santa Ana to Flores to take care of this at the hotel? I asked the guy how he knew where I was staying, he told me he asked the bus company, they knew what hotel I had booked through. Why did he ask? Why was he not told? This was very strange. He pulled out a receipt pad and gave me a ticket to Rio Dulce and I gave him my ticket to Guatemala. He was ready to head out and I told him I expected some money back. Now he feigned that he couldn’t understand my Spanish. When I told him to just give me my ticket back and that I would take care of it at the office he suddenly understood me again and offered questioningly Q100, of my original Q150 fare. Ok, game’s up. I don’t know how much he is pocketing but I now have a ticket in hand and I am only out $7 USD.
“¿Que hora bus?”, What hour is the bus I asked.
“Nuevo media. Debes estar en el hotel en 20 minutos.” Nine thirty. You have to be at the hotel in 20 minutes.
What the hell?
I rushed to my room and packed. I don’t like packing this quickly as I am prone to leaving things. In a few minutes my packs were stuffed with everything I could see and I headed out the door with some misgivings, with an ill-defined feeling that something was just not right. The hotel with the bus stop was but a hundred meters down the road. I went through my mental check list and asked the gringo that had shown up at the bus stop to watch my bags and ran back to the hotel and grabbed my toilet kit from the bathroom. As I was running back at least four people told me the bus was coming. Everybody knows everybody’s business in these small towns. The bus passed me, I arrived at the bus stop, the bus drove past as I knew it would and went to the end of the street, turned around and headed back.
The conductor opened the storage compartment, I threw in my backpack and boarded the bus with my day pack. A few minutes later we were in Santa Ana at the bus terminal and the bus started to fill up. I headed out for a coffee but there was none for sale in the terminal. Across the street was a 24 hour restaurant at which I ordered a couple of cups to go. In Guatemala it is not uncommon for coffee to be brewed one cup at a time which makes for excellent coffee but not the speediest of service. My coffee arrived many minutes later in plastic cups beverage cups which were almost too hot to handle. I scurried back to the bus stop and looked around the lot. All of the buses were dilapidated; where was my new Mercedes bus? Damn it! Not with my luggage. My consternation was evident and a man in the lot came over “¿Donde este bus hasta Rio Dulce?” The man wanted to sell me a ticket. I just needed the damn bus. Finally I ran around the corner of the terminal and in one of two slots was my bus, exactly where I had left it; I am so bad I can leave my truck in a Home Depot parking lot and spend more time looking for it than I did buying things. I never shopped at Home Depot; I knew where everything was.
Three hours later I was in Rio Dulce. As usual the exit doors to the bus were blocked by taxi drivers soliciting rides and as usual I ignored anybody so obnoxious that they blocked my exit. The luggage space was packed with bags, I told the conductor that my bag was a red backpack. He grabbed anything that was red and showed it to me. No baggage tags, I could have taken anything I wanted. Mine of course was way in the back. I walked around the bus, opened the other door, grabbed my pack, shut the door and headed on my way. My way to where? I had no idea where I was going. I asked a Gringo where a good place to stay was and he directed me to a river front hotel near the bridge. A few hundred meters later I was at the bridge, took the path down under it and encountered an American couple and restated my question. Seconds later a man, watching me, showed up on a bicycle with a laminated brochure of what must surely be every accommodation in the city. I chose Tortugal, a marina and guest house. The man told me that the only way to get to Tortugal was by boat and showed me to the dock under the bridge. The next boat was coming in 15 minutes. Sure enough the Tortugal boat showed up and took me, as it’s only passenger to Tortugal a ride of about four minutes.
I stepped out of the boat onto the floating dock which must have dropped about six inches under my weight and I wasn’t even wearing my two packs which weigh in at about seventy pounds. The receptionist showed me the various accommodations and I chose the dormitory which was the second story of a palapa right on the water’s edge. The roof had four dormers, each with a bed; each bed having mosquito netting and a large locker for securing one’s gear. I wandered every bit of trail and boardwalk with my camera, grabbed a few shots, and decided that it was surely possible to walk to town. After a few minutes on a stone covered road I reached a gate and a two lane asphalt road. I took the road to town and wandered around for an hour. One street was nothing but markets, mostly fruits and vegetables with a few cell phone stores thrown in. Belize is the only country I have been to in Central America where there was not at least one cell phone store per block; I don’t know whether that is because the ridiculous tariffs in Belize or the fact that the locals have no money to buy one anyway; I suspect it is a combination of the two.
It didn’t take long to discover a tipico soda (typical food cafe) and I grabbed a carne de la plancha con arroz, usually translated meat of the plate with rice and walked back to the marina. I was greeted by the couple that I had met under the bridge previously. They were living at the marina on a 42′ cruiser. I was introduced to another ex-pat couple that was living on a sail boat at the marina. Graciously they invited me to happy hour on their boat at five.
After sunset I started working on editing my days pictures and realized that I was missing a bag of five thumb drives that I had been using, for the first time in months, the previous day; I had taken them out to install some software. I emptied my day pack. No, surely it was missing. Was it taken while I worked at the computer at the desk in the reception area at Casablanca? I had left it unattended several times, but no one had taken my notebook or external drive. Searching the web I found the phone number to the hotel. This was far more difficult than I would have expected. The phone at the Marina is available for public use at Q4 a minute, pretty outrageous markup over 1,000%. A man answered and said that I would have to talk with someone in the morning. I asked him to have them put them on the bus if they found them. He said he would and started to sign off. WTF? I hadn’t told him which bus.
Rather than wait, I’ll just give up. I hadn’t used these things but once in the last nine months anyway and there was nothing confidential that wasn’t encrypted. I am set to take the 9:30 boat to Lexington. Time to pack.
Jonathan Allen LaFleur